A couple of weeks ago, two historians sat down to discuss the meaning and influence of Forrest Gump. David Parsons is an adjunct in Southern California and author of Dangerous Grounds: Antiwar Coffeehouses and Military Dissent in the Vietnam Era. Bill Black is an editor at Contingent Magazine and an instructor at Western Kentucky University.
David wrote for (and Bill co-edited) a Contingent roundtable on Gump, which you can read here. Their chat was recorded for the Nostalgia Trap podcast, of which David is the host. You can listen to the episode below (or here, if you use the Apple podcast app). The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
DAVID: The reason I want to talk to you is because you guys over at Contingent Magazine are putting together a suite of essays on Forrest Gump. This summer is the 25th anniversary of its release, which blows my mind.
BILL: It is hard to believe. When it came out, it was the fourth-highest grossing film of all time. I don’t know if the kids these days watch it, I don’t know if they fully realize…
DAVID: How big it was?
BILL: Yeah.
DAVID: Well, it was a certain moment in Tom Hanks’s career, too. He’d won the Oscar the year before for Philadelphia. He was turning from the bachelor party guy of the ’80s into a more serious actor and then this film seemed to combine all his talents in some way, because it’s a dramatic film with a comedic edge to it. And I don’t know if you remember this, but I actually remember the trailer coming out and being really amped for it. It really felt like an event film.
BILL: Really? You see, I was born in ’88, so I don’t really remember Forrest Gump not existing. For me it was this video cassette that we had that I just watched all the time, probably starting, well—I do know it was the first PG-13 movie I got to watch. An exception was carved out for it because it was an “important” movie.
DAVID: Why do you think people thought Forrest Gump was an important film?
BILL: Well, in your essay you wrote for us, you use the term “greatest hits,” a greatest-hits compilation of the Boomer generation’s coming-of-age. You got your Elvis and the ’60s counterculture and desegregation and Vietnam and Watergate and even the AIDS epidemic (obliquely). I think someone has said it’s basically a two-and-a-half-hour-long rendition of “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”
DAVID: The ’90s were this moment of reflection back to the ’60s and why they mattered, and it was happening all over the place, grunge and all that stuff that was picking up on the hippie thing. Gump comes out in ’94, it collected a lot of stuff that was in the air and condensed it into this sweet story. Like, look at who directed the film, it’s Robert Zemeckis—Back to the Future. In 1985 Back to the Future was doing the same thing, looking back to the 1950s as this formative moment, and that makes sense because that’s the generation of people that are making these movies.
BILL: The movie is trying to bring about an armistice to the culture wars. It’s like, okay, here’s all the fights that we had as Americans about Vietnam, about civil rights, about Watergate, and we’re going to have this figure at the center of it, who is above it all. He is apolitical, and that is seen as a saving grace for him. In the scene towards the end when he’s running, there’s a point where people are trying to figure out why he’s running and they’re trying to attach some sort of political meaning to it. These journalists are running alongside him and asking, are you running for the animals? Are you running for world peace, are you running for women’s rights? And he’s just, sort of, I don’t know, I’m just running. And that is seen as, like, he’s cutting the Gordian knot and finally bringing America together—kind of parallel to what Bill Clinton was trying to do.
DAVID: There’s an awshucks-ness to him. Many historians made that connection with Clinton—and that’s a really weird thing to say because I think of Bill Clinton as such a calculating creature, but at the same time that image of aw shucks, above-it-all, is the Third Way. Environmental activism, women’s rights, those kinds of things don’t really matter, what really matters is the act of moving forward and being American. It extracts the politics out of it. Gump is a figure that stands—I don’t know if above is the right term, it’s almost outside—but also he’s in all these events, right? Doesn’t he break the Watergate case?
BILL: Yeah.
DAVID: He’s a weird kind of fulcrum around which a lot of history turns.
BILL: I suppose a lot of Americans felt that way, like they had been present for so much that changed the country in the ’60s and ’70s and ’80s and yet they were still somehow alienated from those events. There’s this discussion throughout the film of, you know, are we just feathers blown on the wind or do we make our own destiny? And Forrest Gump has his little soliloquy towards the end where he’s visiting Jenny’s grave, and he says, maybe it’s both somehow. Do you think that has some sort of political salience?
DAVID: Yeah, the idea that we came to some irreconcilable difference in the ’60s and it had to do with women’s rights and Vietnam and those sorts of things—and that the answer to that is the middle, the answer is saying it’s both. Zemeckis is a big Democrat, isn’t he? Why make this movie this way? What it’s saying is hey, at the end of the day, we’re all Americans and let’s split the difference. And as we’re discovering, centrism is a political choice and a radical ideology unto its own.
BILL: Tom Hanks, Zemeckis, Spielberg, they have this guilt about what the Boomer generation may or may not have done; they have this guilt that they’ve let the Greatest Generation down (thinking about what you and Daniel Bessner talked about with Saving Private Ryan). And there’s this nostalgia for this mythic time when liberals and conservatives could join hands, and Reagan and Tip O’Neill could have their cocktails or whatever, and these men who had their mistresses and smoke-filled rooms could put a man on the moon (Apollo 13!) and build the interstate and do these big things. And we just need to get back to that somehow.
There’s an interview that Tom Hanks did with the New York Times just a couple years ago, and he mentioned this book by Jay Winik called April 1865: The Month That Saved America. (He’s very much the dad who likes to read the Dad Books.) And he reads out loud from the beginning of the book (which is a very much a Dad Book thing to do, to read the first 25 or 30 pages and then just read this paragraph to everybody that you meet). “And where abolitionists preached slavery as a violation against the higher law, Southerners angrily countered with their own version of the deity, that it was sanctioned by the Constitution. In the vortex of this debate, once the battle lines were sharply drawn, moderate ground everywhere became hostage to the passions of the two sides. Reason itself had become suspect; mutual tolerance was seen as treachery.” And then Tom Hanks looks up and he says, “Somehow, sometime in the last 20 years of our generation, that’s re-emerged.” And it’s like, wait, are you saying that we should not be like the abolitionists?1
DAVID: Right. There’s a middle path.
BILL: The middle path was kind of shitty. It was, oh, you know, slavery is bad but we don’t want to emancipate the slaves all at once, yada yada.
DAVID: That’s what I hate about Forrest Gump. That centrism is like, well gosh, there’s just bad people on all sides, why can’t we just get along? And I’m sorry to do, like, a minstrel Southern accent just now—but that’s something that I wanted to bring up with you, because the Southernness of this film—what do we do with that? They actually do a flashback to Nathan Bedford Forrest, and I always thought it was weird how he says, well it turns out my ancestors liked to ride horses and dress up like ghosts and go scare people. They make this, like, ha-ha reference to the KKK. And as a person who’s Southern, how do you take this stuff, because it’s part of that whole mythology that the “Southern” place is where we go to reconcile these different things, we need a simple Southern person to tell us what America’s all about.
BILL: We need Southernness that is drained of any politics, right? So his response when the University of Alabama’s being forcibly integrated and George Wallace is symbolically standing at the schoolhouse door, you know, Tom Hanks doesn’t respond by saying that George Wallace is wrong or integration is a good thing. His response is, when one of the black students is going through the door her notebook falls, and he goes to give her back the notebook. That is the response, an apolitical but nice thing.
DAVID: Yeah and it’s a piece of the digital wizardry that was a hallmark of the film, this amazing insertion of Tom Hanks into these key moments in history.
BILL: The original deepfakes.
DAVID: Yeah!
BILL: You know, this is where I learned who Nathan Bedford Forrest was.
DAVID: Me too, totally.
BILL: He says that Sally Field named him after Nathan Bedford Forrest to remind him that sometimes people do things that just don’t make sense. It’s like, so how is that…?
DAVID: Actually the KKK made a whole lot of sense, Sally Field!
BILL: Yeah it wasn’t just silly.
DAVID: They were protecting their self-interest with violence, dude! Like, it’s pretty fucking clear what the KK was about, not some silly ghosts dressing up in sheets and doing some silly stuff. That’s part of what’s so infuriating about the film, is its reduction of things like that.
BILL: And probably, you know, it has something similar to Bill Clinton’s Southernness. I’m trying to think of examples in the ’90s, probably NASCAR, Jeff Foxworthy.
DAVID: Country music was huge in the ’90s, line-dancing took over the suburbs. I was in high school and, before I fell into my ska years, I was a founding members of something called, like, the Country-Western Preservation Society, and I wore my dad’s cowboy boots to school even though they didn’t fit me and it was really hard to walk in them and people made fun of me. Garth Brooks was a megastar in the ’90s. It was like, we’re all discovering our twang now, and by we I mean white people.
BILL: “The South is good now.” And now America can reclaim what it had lost, because what was best about America is preserved in the South. And of course it’s a South that’s depoliticized. And when the South is depoliticized in culture, it’s also de-blackened, because you almost have to do that to depoliticize it. Though, you know, you have Bubba…
DAVID: What do you think of Bubba? I don’t know what to do with him. I wrote about this in my piece, that Bubba represents the black experience. They even even do the flashbacks with Bubba, where they show his ancestors, a series of mamas making shrimp for white people.
BILL: Well, maybe part of it is that Bubba has to die in Vietnam for the movie to work.
DAVID: Sure.
BILL: I don’t think the movie works with Forrest and Bubba on the shrimp boat. Forrest Gump and Lieutenant Dan take on, almost in a macabre way, they take on Bubba’s life, almost a sort of minstrelsy. All of a sudden they are moving to Bayou La Batre, and Forrest takes care of Bubba’s mom and Bubba’s siblings, because Bubba can’t because he died. And when Forrest Gump gets a bunch of money (because Lieutenant Dan invested their Bubba Gump Shrimp money in Apple stock) and gives Bubba’s family half the money, and we see Bubba’s mama dressed in a kind of ’90s, Bill Cosby, middle-class black aesthetic, and a white woman is bringing her shrimp—it’s done through Forrest’s stooping down to take on Bubba’s persona.
DAVID: Yeah, and investing in Silicon Valley.
BILL: There’s a lot of layers to this!
DAVID: I think that’s true that Bubba needs to die, and it’s not unlike things we’ve seen in other movies where the white characters absorb the powers of the dead black characters. In the novel by Winston Groom—which is really different from the movie, it’s a lot dirtier, Forrest fucks a lot more in the book if you wanna check that out—but the shrimp thing doesn’t come from Bubba in the book. The shrimp thing comes from Vietnam. Forrest goes off into the rivers and learns from an old Vietnamese shipping captain, but it’s the same effect, right? Forrest is absorbing the skill and strength from these little people he encounters along the way.
BILL: You know, there’s a moment when they get off the helicopter and arrive in Vietnam when Bubba says, I hear the shrimp is great out here, and when the war is over we can shrimp here. So Bubba has this imperialist fantasy.
DAVID: And Bubba is presented as super-dumb too. They seem like a a Key and Peele sketch.
BILL: Do you think we’re supposed to think Forrest and Bubba are part of Project 100,000?
DAVID: Wow. That’s something I hadn’t really thought about. Project 100,000 was conceived as a way to draw people into the military that wouldn’t meet the standards of the draft otherwise, whether for some sort of physical or mental deficiency, so they wanted to lower those standards. And the liberal gloss on it—because [Secretary of Defense Robert] McNamara is a liberal and part of LBJ’s administration—he’s like, this is going to left these people out of situations they’re in, and service in the military is going to improve their lives. But either way it was not received well.
BILL: This might help us understand Bubba a little bit. There’s a great article by Jennifer Hyland Wang called “A Struggle of Contending Stories,” published in Cinema Journal. And she cites this op-ed, published soon upon the film’s release, by one Patrick J. Buchanan.2
DAVID: I’ve heard that name.
BILL: The title is “Hollywood Surprise: Hello, I’m Forrest Gump, and I’m a conservative.” Buchanan writes, “Is there some tiny cell of conservatives burrowing deep inside the Hollywood cultural elite. The question comes to mind after coming out of the movie sensation for the summer, Forrest Gump.” He has this weird gloss on what Sally Field does to get Forrest into quote-unquote normal school, which, I mean, she sleeps with the principal—
DAVID: I think that scene is why the film is PG-13.
BILL: Yeah, that and the premature ejaculation scene, and we do see butt, we see Robin Wright’s butt.
DAVID: It’s a lewd film.
BILL: But yeah, “Sally Field, refusing to let them put her boy in a ‘special school.’ She does not whine or complain; she will do anything for her son.” He doesn’t say what she does, but apparently the liberal thing would be to whine or complain.
DAVID: Right.
BILL: Then it says, “In the Army bus Forrest is befriended, by Bubba, a simple black youth from Louisiana who dreams of becoming a shrimp boat captain… In Vietnam, Forrest shoots no one; his fellow soldiers commit no atrocities; they are not bitter at being there; they are decent, working-class kids, faithful to their country’s call to serve, doing their job.” One thing Bubba does is help create this image of our boys out in Vietnam—and it’s like, here’s all of America, white and black and North and South. And, you know, for many people, especially my age, it was a long time before I really saw another depiction of the Vietnam War. I wasn’t watching Platoon when I was 10. It was the PG-13 Vietnam movie.
DAVID: “And we were always looking for someone named Charlie.” He doesn’t understand what they’re doing, but it’s okay, we can still act correctly and do the right thing and work for each other. And I think it’s critical what Pat Buchanan says about how you don’t see any atrocities or war crimes, you don’t see people complaining. That’s very critical to the narrative. I wanted to ask you if the film is conservative or not, because it feels like it’s revealing, you know, the synergy between the conservative and liberal vision.
BILL: I don’t think it was conceived as conservative. I know Zemeckis responded—because Pat Buchanan was not the only conservative sort of co-opting the movie, the National Review put it on its list that year of the top 100 conservative movies ever made—and Robert Zemeckis just said, well, the right has a machine the left doesn’t have, so he’s not surprised that the right was able to somehow glom onto it, but he said the movie wasn’t really about left or right, it was just about people. It was supposed to be apolitical, but it has a story in which that is really impossible.
DAVID: I’m thinking about the Jenny character, who is interesting because she’s not like Forrest, she steps out of the middle path. She’s a Christ-like martyr figure who gets punished every time you check in on her, but she’s punished as part of the milieu of the counterculture. She’s singing folk music and she has to be naked onstage and there’s a bunch of assholes throwing beer cans at her. In the ’70s, she’s coked-out and almost committing suicide because she’s apparently in an abusive relationship. And the last time we see her, they introduce the AIDS crisis, and so a kind of sexual punishment has happened here. And it feels like Jenny is an object lesson in why the counterculture was so damaging, and the end result is that Forrest is a single father. He is the one that reconstitutes the family and keeps the next generation alive because she’s gone, she’s dead, literally the counterculture experience killed her.
BILL: Pat Buchanan has a line, he says, “Where Forrest is faithful, waiting outside her dorm for Jenny to come home from dates, Jenny is amoral, sluttish. When Forrest is drafted, she sets out for Haight-Asbury.” I do think, though, even though she’s punished, she’s not seen as a bad person. The film portrays her having been abused by her father as the sort of core tragedy, and that the answer is to somehow find another father. Forrest tries to be her father figure throughout the movie, where he tries to rescue her from different situations, and the movie points out that Forrest is crossing a line when he does that, he’s trying to be something for her that he can’t be. It’s not that Forrest needs to be a father figure. It’s that she’s only able to redeem herself and find peace when she can accept Forrest as a father to her child.
DAVID: Right.
BILL: Now things are healed. She’s able to create a weird, untraditional family, but a family nonetheless, giving the blessing to Forrest really being his son’s father.
DAVID: Family’s the answer to all of it, really. His mom is this stable figure for him and the one that gets him through. Also, the end of Lieutenant Dan’s narrative is him finding peace finally by getting married, the last time you see him is at Forrest and Jenny’s wedding and Lieutenant Dan is walking again and he’s fully Gary Sinise again, right? He doesn’t have a beard anymore.
BILL: He has his magic legs made possible by American industry.
DAVID: And he has a woman.
BILL: Yeah, exactly.
DAVID: Lieutenant Dan represents the heart of American military culture, they show his ancestors had fought in every American war and died on every battlefield and he has this special destiny etc. But by the time the Vietnam War is over and we see Lieutenant Dan again, he’s a wrecked alcoholic in a wheelchair, the stereotype of the destroyed Vietnam vet. And Lieutenant Dan and Forrest have this relationship in which Forrest recognizes that Lieutenant Dan is lost, he’s fallen off the path just like Jenny. He’s an alcoholic, he’s involved with prostitutes, he asks Forrest about Jesus and he’s lost his faith—and I think that’s a big part of Lieutenant Dan’s story, is losing his faith. That scene where he’s in the storm, on top of the ship’s mast, screaming at God and making his peace with God, and at the end he’s floating in the water. I’m always crying during that scene, that scene really gets me, something about the idea of getting over his Vietnam experience. But I’m also troubled by how simple all of it is, and how the happy ending for Lieutenant Dan is reconstituting this family unit. And that’s what makes him walk again. That’s what ends his Vietnam crisis.
BILL: And his alienation is not portrayed as a political one, right? He’s never shown as one of the vets against Vietnam; instead it’s a personal, religious trauma, that his destiny was thwarted and he can’t walk with Jesus.
DAVID: I mean, he’s visually rendered as a Ron Kovic character, he looks like the radical Vietnam vet but you’re right, he’s stripped of all politics. He’s actually pissed that he didn’t die in Vietnam because that was his vision of what he was supposed to do to keep the legacy of his ancestors.
BILL: Yeah, he’s not mad at LBJ. He’s mad at God and Forrest, who acted as an angelic emissary in saving him. And Dan’s redemption is found by accepting Forrest having saved him, and by extension God having done so. You know, the one scene that really haunts me is the only glimpse we have of the anti–Vietnam War movement; I am curious what you think of this. Forrest Gump stumbles into an anti-war protest at the National Mall and he gives this little speech, though the microphones aren’t working because some renegade cop has undone the wires and they get it back in time only for him to be like, “And that’s all I have to say about that.” And it’s implied that what he said about the war was moving but not political, that death is sad, that’s the vibe we get. And then he’s reunited with Jenny, and shortly thereafter he is in this bizarre scene.
DAVID: Love this scene. Best scene in the movie for me.
BILL: We see Jenny’s boyfriend, they say he’s the head of the SDS chapter at Berkeley, which is just perfect. It can’t just be SDS, it can’t just be Berkeley, he’s the SDS head at Berkeley. And of course the guys calls Forrest Gump a baby-killer and ends up slapping Jenny and Forrest beats him up.
DAVID: I’m looking at the guy right now on the Google Image search and he’s got, like, little tiny Trotsky glasses. He’s portrayed like a communist.
BILL: You think he’s being coded as Jewish?
DAVID: I would assume so. What I hate about this stuff is it produced a kind of shorthand that other films use when they want to show, like, ’60s chaos. I was watching a recent, terrible Spielberg film about this era called The Post, which was about Daniel Ellsberg leaking the Pentagon papers, but Spielberg decided, of course, to make the whole film about the rich people that own the Washington Post instead of the actual people that took risks. But there’s a scene where they walk into the Supreme Court building and there’s all these activists and protesters that are yelling and screaming about the Vietnam War. And everything about it spoke to this kind of visual rendering of the ’60s as these weirdo, silly people—almost like the KKK, right? Like they’re just a bunch of silly people that do silly things—and I don’t know why, when you can just be like Forrest and walk through life without putting on a silly costume.
BILL: I was just thinking, I don’t know when was the next time I got another image to counterweigh the image that Forrest Gump gave me of the Black Panthers. Probably an upper-level history class as an undergrad. I remember at my high school we had a high-school news channel thing, once a week they’d play some news special during homeroom. And they did some Black History Month special, but they were forbidden from including any images of Black Panthers, Black Power, Malcolm X, basically anything that wasn’t Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks.
DAVID: This is a public high school.
BILL: Yeah.
DAVID: That’s wack, man.
BILL: Bolton High School in Arlington, Tennessee.
DAVID: In my AP US History course in Southern California, I had, like, a hippie teacher who wore Birkenstocks and drove a Mercedes and she encouraged us to be into Malcolm X and shit like that.
BILL: Actually, our dress code forbade having shirts with Malcolm X’s face on it or the Black Power fist. We had this long list—and it included Confederate imagery, you weren’t allowed to wear that to high school either. It was “those silly Confederates and those silly Black Panthers.”
DAVID: It’s very telling that we embody the hope of closure in this simple Southern man who just takes life as it comes and walks through American history without ever taking a side.
BILL: And it gave us the smiley face.
DAVID: The reason I wanted to write about the running sequence is because I taught a whole course on the 1970s and I made my students write about that sequence as the final exam. And I was like, I want to write about this! It’s meant to be this moment where Forrest has been traumatized by the death of his mother, and Jenny leaving after visiting him. And much like America, Forrest needs to find himself in the ’70s. He goes searching and running and he doesn’t know why. One of the key things is the soundtrack which is Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty,” the lyrics of which are, like, in ’65 I was 17, and in ’69 I was 21, and the song narrates a folksy walk through the chaotic late ’60s and the feeling of being lost in the ’70s, and I don’t know where I’m running.
And all these people follow Forrest, right? All these Americans feel the same way. They’re looking for someone to follow and looking for some direction after Vietnam and Watergate. And the smiley face is part of a little sequence within that sequence in which men are running up to Forrest and saying, like, I want to start a business but I don’t have an idea, and Forrest inadvertently gives them the idea. What do you make of that?
BILL: I mean, they want to commodify Forrest because he becomes a national fad. And it’s almost like something in the Gospels where someone comes to Christ wanting one thing from him and he won’t give that to them but instead he gives them something else they weren’t expecting.
DAVID: Yeah, he’s even got a long beard, he looks like Jesus.
BILL: I think about the “shit happens” [bumper sticker]. That’s kind of the embodiment of the feather.
DAVID: Yeah, on the wind.
BILL: And the smiley face is Forrest’s apolitical, childlike… Somehow we’re supposed to fuse those two things to get the answer to the problem the ’60s created. Something that you talked about was how the film’s commenting of the ’70s culture of self-empowerment, the Me Generation, and how that was portrayed as supposedly apolitical.
DAVID: For that class, we read Bruce Schulman’s book The Seventies, he writes a lot about the interest in the New Age and alternative religions and this kind of seeking. And his reading of that is [after] the ’60s crash, all that energy of the Boomer generation went in a million different directions; it went to the Clintonism, it went to Wall Street, but it also went to a more adventurous place. And what was identified by Tom Wolfe in his famous essay, he said what we’re seeing is essentially a generation of people who are looking for answers in places that Americans have not looked before—but they’ve turned away from communitarian ideals of the 1960s counterculture and turned that all to self-improvement.3
BILL: Think of the way the movie rewrites John Lennon’s “Imagine.” We have Forrest Gump—having done some ping-tour in China, some sort of goodwill ambassador thing—and he’s on the Dick Cavett Show with the magically inserted John Lennon. They ask Forrest to describe China and he says, oh, they don’t really have anything, no clothes; and John Lennon says, “No possessions?” Forrest Gump says they don’t ever go to church, and John Lennon says, “No religion too?” So we have “Imagine” constructed as a kind of mockery of anti-capitalist, anti-religious China.
DAVID: They’re kind of red-baiting there too. John Lennon’s “Imagine” is just a silly version of what communist China is like.
BILL: Do you think a movie could be as big a thing within public consciousness and public memory as Forrest Gump was? It sold 78 million tickets. The soundtrack sold six million copies. I listened to that soundtrack over and over again.
DAVID: Yeah, I consumed Forrest Gump for years, and I don’t even know when the turn took place where I realized what the film was and began to be troubled by it and really think about the history of it.
BILL: One reason it was big for me is, you know, my uncle Bill Black was Elvis’s bassist. The first time it really clicked with me what that meant was when Forrest Gump passes by some department store and there’s a TV on sale, and Elvis is performing “Hound Dog” and there’s Bill Black playing the bass right beside him. And I remember my parents pausing, like, oh that’s your uncle. If you can imagine, I was eight, nine, ten.
DAVID: A personal connection.
BILL: A lot of my understanding of what it means to have a relationship to the past at all, what it means to live in a country with a history—a lot of it was indelibly shaped by this movie in a way that any analysis I might do isn’t going to change.
DAVID: I think the power of the nostalgia trap is that it overcomes those criticism. I was going through clips of Forrest Gump to think about writing something for Contingent, there’s the scene where Forrest is watching his mom die and her giving her last bits of advice, it just tore me apart. I’m sitting here, like, God damn it, I’m trying to analyze this to write an essay and I am just totally taken in by the skill with which this movie delivers its emotional power. That’s why I study movies, and that’s why I think they’re such dangerous pieces of media. You asked could we have this again, like a Forrest Gump–type thing? I don’t know.
BILL: Avengers is the monoculture now. It’s hard to imagine Forrest Gump being the monoculture. This could have been something that Netflix bought and was never even released in theaters.
DAVID: Tom Hanks is still there.
BILL: Yeah. He’s got where he plays just quietly confident guys who are just trying to do their job.
DAVID: He teaches us how to do the right thing.
BILL: Were you the one asking if Tom Hanks has—
DAVID: Had sex in the movies? Yeah. I tweeted that last week and people were like, yeah, of course he has sex in movies. He had sex in Philadelphia because he had AIDS, had sex in Forrest Gump with Jenny. And I’m like, no, I’m not asking if his character has sex, I’m asking if Tom Hanks is ever portrayed literally having sex. I think that’s a critical part of Tom Hanks’s whole persona is that he’s kind of chaste. Did you have any examples of Tom Hanks fucking?
BILL: I haven’t seen Cloud Atlas, it seems like that might be a movie where they might’ve snuck it in.4
DAVID: They made him sexy, or tried to, in Da Vinci Code, because he has slightly longer hair, slicked-back hair.
BILL: Well, and the message in The Da Vinci Code is that we all have a little bit of the divine in us, which is essentially Forrest Gump.
DAVID: Instead of, like, we’re all Americans, we’re all Merovingians.
BILL: I mean, Forrest Gump is not a Christian movie, it is more of a New Agey movie. It’s like, if we can have the New Agey-ness without all the silliness.
DAVID: You’re right. He’s the archetypal seeker. But where does that seeking end? Lieutenant Dan and Forrest Gump both grow their hair really long and have really long beards in the ’70s, but by the end of the film they’ve cut all that bullshit out, they’re basically back in their business suits. That is the middle path. They’ve internalized the spiritual lessons, but they’re back in the suit. Which is Bill Clinton.
BILL: Yeah.
DAVID: God, Bill. Thanks for tossing the Gump ball around with me, it was fun.
BILL: Probably a volleyball.
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- Maureen Dowd, “Hollywood’s Most Decent Fella on Weinstein, Trump and History,” New York Times, Oct. 11, 2017. Hanks was reading from Jay Winik, April 1865: The Month That Saved America (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 49–50.
- Jennifer Hyland Wang, “‘A Struggle of Contending Stories’: Race, Gender, and Political Memory in Forrest Gump,” Cinema Journal 39 (Spring 2000): 92–115; Patrick J. Buchanan, “Hollywood Surprise: Hello, I’m Forrest Gump, and I’m a conservative,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Aug. 8, 1994, p. B3 (if you don’t have a newspapers.com subscription, you can access it via this Twitter thread or this high-resolution jpeg).
- Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in America Culture, Society, and Politics (New York: Free Press, 2001); Tom Wolfe, “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” New York, Aug. 23, 1976.
- Tom Hanks does not, in fact, have a sex scene in Cloud Atlas.
